Powering the Online Experience: PubNub's Billion Connected Devices

In this episode, Stephen Blum, the Founder and CTO of PubNub, discusses their proprietary message bus connecting billions of devices, scaling challenges, and managing a world record-breaking event. They explore PubNub's rapid product launch, customer feedback-driven development, and transition to automated scalability. The conversation also delves into the impact of WebSockets on communication, the current state of San Francisco, including remote work effects, homelessness, and tech scene dispersal, as well as the COVID-19 impact on cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
In this episode, Stephen Blum, the Founder and CTO of PubNub, discusses their proprietary message bus connecting billions of devices, scaling challenges, and managing a world record-breaking event. They explore PubNub's rapid product launch, customer feedback-driven development, and transition to automated scalability. The conversation also delves into the impact of WebSockets on communication, the current state of San Francisco, including remote work effects, homelessness, and tech scene dispersal, as well as the COVID-19 impact on cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
Stephen Blum is the Founder and CTO of PubNub, a trailblazing real-time communication infrastructure that powers telemedicine apps, online learning platforms, multiplayer gaming, on-demand delivery apps, and more. With over a decade of experience leading PubNub, he has driven the development of a highly reliable and fast Multi POP Realtime Data Stream Network. Stephen's career journey showcases his expertise in real-time technology and innovation. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow:
PubNub also supports Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence, providing notifications for page updates. Building scalable tech requires careful consideration of memory usage and bug fixes to handle high concurrency. They re-architected and rewrote the message bus to create a globally distributed system, similar to a CDN. Many companies, including Twitter and LinkedIn, have embraced web sockets to power live-streaming and real-time communication features. San Francisco's office buildings are mostly empty as remote work has become the new normal, leading to high vacancy rates. Tech workers are moving away from San Francisco to more affordable and remote-friendly locations like Lake Tahoe and Austin. The crime rates in cities like Philadelphia have risen, creating safety concerns for residents.
Resources: PubNub Curotec  Akamai Atlassian Clubhouse
Connect with Stephen Blum:LinkedIn
Connect with our host, Brian Dainis:Linktree
Quotables: 20:23 - “So if you build this wonderful thing over a year, it doesn't matter because you have to throw a half of it. So that's just launch as soon as possible. It, so before we jump to something else, this is the same thing. Even within an existing big business, when you're launching a new product, you could spend one year, two years on a product and the product could maybe have been most likely fail, right? So instead of, you know, building this wonderful architecture and plan and all these tests and everything like that, don't just, just get to market as quickly as possible. Start getting customers feedback. And then, because guess what? Day one, you'll have zero customers, right? Launch day one, zero customers. Great. So now you've launched,